There was no one from the hunting lodge come to meet us at the village station ringed on the map. It was night. Autumn cold. We stood about and stamped our feet in the adventure of it. There was no station-master. A telephone booth, but whom could we call upon? All inclusive; you will be escorted by a guide and interpreter everywhere — so we had not thought to take the telephone number of the lodge. There was a wooden shack in the darkness, blurry with thick yellow light and noise. A bar! The men of the party went over to join the one male club that has reciprocal membership everywhere; the women were uncertain whether they would be acceptable — the customs of each country have to be observed, in some you can bare your breasts, in others you are indecent if wearing trousers. The Englishman came back and forth to report. Men were having a wild time in the shack, they must be celebrating something, they were some kind of brotherhood, black-haired and unshaven, drunk. We sat on our baggage in the mist of steam left by the train, a dim caul of visibility lit by the glow of the bar, and our world fell away sheer from the edge of the platform. Nothing. At an unknown stage of a journey to an unknown place, suddenly unimaginable.
An old car splashed into the station yard. The lodge manager fell out on his feet like a racing driver. He wore a green felt hat with badges and feathers fastened round the band. He spoke our language, yes. It’s not good there, he said when the men of the party came out of the bar. You watch your pocket. Gypsies. They don’t work, only steal, and make children so the government gives them money every time.
The moon on its back.
One of the first things he will have noticed when he arrived was that the moon in the Southern Hemisphere lies the wrong way round. The sun still rises in the east and sets in the west but the one other certainty to be counted on, that the same sky that covers the village covers the whole earth, is gone. What greater confirmation of how far away; as you look up, on the first night.
He might have learnt a few words on the ship. Perhaps someone who had preceded him by a year or so met him. He was put on a train that travelled for two days through vineyards and mountains and then the desert; but long before the ship landed already he must have been too hot in the suit, coming south. On the high plateau he arrived at the gold mines to be entrusted to a relative. The relative had been too proud to have explained by post that he was too poor to take him in but the wife made this clear. He took the watch-making tools he had been provided with and went to the mines. And then? He waylaid white miners and replaced balance wheels and broken watch-faces while-you-wait, he went to the compounds where black miners had proudly acquired watches as the manacles of their new slavery: to shift work. In this, their own country, they were migrants from their homes, like him. They had only a few words of the language, like him. While he picked up English he also picked up the terse jargon of English and their languages the miners were taught so that work orders could be understood. Fanagalo: ‘Do this, do it like this’. A vocabulary of command. So straight away he knew that if he was poor and alien at least he was white, he spoke his broken phrases from the rank of the commanders to the commanded: the first indication of who he was, now. And the black miners’ watches were mostly cheap ones not worth mending. They could buy a new one for the price he would have to ask for repairs; he bought a small supply of Zobo pocket watches and hawked them at the compounds. So it was because of the blacks he became a business man; another indication.
And then?
Zobos were fat metal circles with a stout ring at the top and a loud tick tramping out time. He had a corrugated-tin-roofed shop with his watch-maker’s bench in a corner and watches, clocks and engagement and wedding rings for sale. The white miners were the ones whose custom it was to mark betrothals with adornments bought on the instalment plan. They promised to pay so-much-a-month; on the last Friday, when they had their wages, they came in from the hotel bar smelling of brandy. He taught himself to keep books and carried bad debts into the Depression of the Thirties.
He was married, with children, by then. Perhaps they had offered to send a girl out for him, a home girl with whom he could make love in his own language, who would cook according to the dietary rules. It was the custom for those from the villages; he surely could have afforded the fare. But if they knew he had left the tin shack behind the shop where he had slept when first he became a business man, surely they couldn’t imagine him living in the local hotel where the white miners drank and he ate meat cooked by blacks. He took singing lessons and was inducted at the Masonic Lodge. Above the roll-top desk in the office behind his new shop, with its sign WATCHMAKER JEWELLER & SILVERSMITH, was an oval gilt-framed studio photograph of him in the apron of his Masonic rank. He made another move; he successfully courted a young woman whose mother tongue was English. From the village above which the moon turned the other way there came as a wedding gift only a strip of grey linen covered with silk embroidery in flowers and scrolls. The old woman who sat on the bench must have done the needlework long before, kept it for the anticipated occasion, because by the time of the distant marriage she was blind (so someone wrote). Injured in a pogrom — was that a supposition, an exaggeration of woes back there, that those who had left all behind used to dramatize an escape? More likely cataracts, in that village, and no surgeon available. The granddaughters discovered the piece of embroidery stuck away behind lavender-scented towels and pillowcases in their mother’s linen cupboard and used it as a carpet for their dolls’ house.
The English wife played the piano and the children sang round her but he didn’t sing. Apparently the lessons were given up; sometimes she laughed with friends over how he had been told he was a light baritone and at Masonic concerts sang ballads with words by Tennyson. As if he knew who Tennyson was! By the time the younger daughter became curious about the photograph looking down behind its bulge of convex glass in the office, he had stopped going to Masonic meetings. Once he had driven into the garage wall when coming home from such an occasion; the damage was referred to in moments of tension, again and again. But perhaps he gave up that rank because when he got into bed beside his wife in the dark after those Masonic gatherings she turned away, with her potent disgust, from the smell of whisky on him. If the phylacteries and skull-cap were kept somewhere the children never saw them. He went fasting to the synagogue on the Day of Atonement and each year, on the anniversaries of the deaths of the old people in that village whom the wife and children had never seen, went again to light a candle. Feeble flame: who were they? In the quarrels between husband and wife, she saw them as ignorant and dirty; she must have read something somewhere that served as a taunt: you slept like animals round a stove, stinking of garlic, you bathed once a week. The children knew how low it was to be unwashed. And whipped into anger, he knew the lowest category of all in her country, this country.